An ancient union: grapes and wine have always inspired artists.
The first evidence of wine in pictorial art can be found in the two-dimensional representations (bas-relief and painting) of ancient Egyptian art , which boasts very ancient origins prior to the 4th millennium BC. In ancient Egyptian art, wine held an important sacral, curative and even of grave goods, as evidenced by the grape seeds found in Egyptian tombs. Wine in Egypt was omnipresent in the festivals dedicated to Osiris, god of wine, real alcoholic banquets of which frescoes and bas-reliefs of Egyptian art preserve the memory.
Furthermore, Egyptian art was the first to depict, on the walls of the tombs, scenes of vine cultivation but also of the grape harvest and winemaking.
Wine later found great space in the ancient art of the Phoenicians, Greeks and later the Etruscans.
The diffusion of wine in ancient art in the West finds its first origin and maximum expression in Hellenic vascular art . In fact, there are countless examples of kraters (kratḕres) , i.e. large vases and amphorae used in Symposia to mix and dilute wine and water, depicting images linked to wine and its consumption.
We owe the Greeks the cult of Dionysus who gave wine a divine connotation, and who inspired the image of wine in classical art.
The Greek iconography of Dionysus, handed down by the Romans with the name of Bacchus, corresponds to an indolent young man with androgynous features.
In fact, Dionysius inspired many famous artists such as Michelangelo, Titian and Cravaggio.
With medieval art and the kingdom of the Lombards, agriculture and viticulture experienced a period of decline and the Arab dominations in southern Europe (600-1000 AD) caused a further reduction in wine and its representation in art, with the banning of viticulture in all occupied territories.
Although medieval art rejected the heritage of classical iconography linked to the exaltation of the intoxication conferred by wine, monasticism became the guardian of viticulture and its unprecedented artistic representation in the '' Tacuina Sanitatis ''.
In fact, wine became part of the liturgy of the Eucharist, allowing the monks to maintain the viticultural tradition; in fact, there is evidence of viticulture in the art of miniatures.
The miniatures created in the monasteries no longer placed the emphasis on the ecstasy linked to wine, but on the work in the vineyard, the harvest and winemaking.
In the Renaissance , wine and the art linked to wine cheered the noble courts such as that of the Medici, becoming symbols of refinement and the exclusive privileges of the hedonistic pleasure linked to it.
The Medici in fact became patrons and promoters of the recovery of the cult of classically inspired wine.
Between 1400 and 1500 there are countless testimonies of works dedicated to Bacchus, including the famous marble statue by Michelangelo Buonarroti, Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne and Leonardo da Vinci's Bacchus. Quintessence of the traditional iconography of Bacchus is the famous Bacchus by Caravaggio from 1596-1998, commissioned by Francesco Maria Bourbon and dedicated to Ferdinando I° dé Medici.
Wine, bucolic life, still lifes and the iconography of Dionysus also rage in much of the neoclassical-inspired art and in academism until the end of the 1900s. Among these we can find virtuous examples of the presence of wine in art with the works of William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Thomas Couture.
Subsequently, starting from 1900, the presence of wine in figurative art has undertaken very heterogeneous and non-aggregate paths, freeing itself from the practice of classical and stereotyped iconography.
Many artists have attempted to depict bottles of wine in their own style: for example, those of Claude Monet in Impressionism, of Joan Miró in Surrealism, of Picasso in Cubism and of De' Chirico and Giorgio Morandi in Metaphysics can be cited.
